https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/with-mattis-leaving-be-afraid/2018/12/21/ae6c2784-0526-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?utm_term=.8d7988795618
THE RESIGNATION of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis propelled a bipartisan wave of anxiety across Washington and many other world capitals, and for good reason. Mr. Mattis was a rock of stability in an otherwise chaotic administration, and his anounced departure followed a pair of precipitous and reckless decisions by President Trump: the removal all U.S. forces from Syria and a 50 percent force reduction in Afghanistan. Combined with his wild swings between accepting a budget compromise and forcing a partial government shutdown on the weekend before Christmas, Mr. Trump appears unhinged and heedless of the damage he might do to vital national interests.
In his resignation letter, Mr. Mattis soberly laid out some of the stakes. He stressed the importance of “our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships” and of “treating allies with respect.” The contrast with Mr. Trump’s tweets claiming that the United States gains “NOTHING” by “protecting others who . . . do not appreciate what we are doing” was stark.
Mr. Mattis rightly said the United States must be “clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors,” including China and Russia, which, he said, “want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.” That was a response to the president’s unfounded dismissal of the continuing threat posed by the Islamic State and his persistant toadying to Russian President Vladimir Putin — who, for his part, was quick to praise the Syria pullout.
I don't like that we are in Syria and Afghanistan. It's been a long time. This is the new normal. Why are we there? We are in Syria to beat ISIS so we don't have any more 9/11 like attacks. Get the terrorists over there so they can't come here! We are currently helping train Afghan troops in the fight against the Taliban. Peace talks have started. But, it's too soon to trust them and too soon to say we are no longer needed. All of this information came from several articles I have read today between both The Washington Post and The New York Times.
All of this while Trump throws a Presidential sized tantrum at the spending bill for not funding the border wall. He tries to blame the shut down on democrats. Forgetting he took responsibility for it last week. The democrats agreed to over $1 billion for border security. Can't say "they don't want to protect us" when they approved funding to do just that. Just a different type of border protection then the wall. In the democrat's version, jobs are created. That's why it had so much support from republicans in congress.
Why is he doing this? He needs good PR with his voter base. He is currently in his re-election campaign. It has started. But, the economy he relied on to boost him is floundering from all sides and the Mueller investigation is closing in on him. He handed in his written answers right before it came out Manafort was lying to investigators and still communicating about it to Trump's lawyers. He wrote lies and Mueller has proof!
So, he's focusing on these two campaign promises. Fox news is eating it up and his Kool-Aid drinking base actually thinks we have defeated ISIS. Every reliable source including some Republican congressmen and women agree that we have very much not defeated ISIS. This is information I also learned through those two reliable and trustworthy news sources.
So, Mattis walks away. Taking logic, reason, and common sense with him. There is no logic, reason or common sense left in this administration. I just hope the still-Republican controlled senate is careful with who they confirm!
When Mattis was first announced I did think the worst. But, I also did my research and have been paying attention. I might not always like or understand Mattis' recommendations. I highly disagree with him on the Iran deal. But, most of his recommendations also sounded like knowledge, experience, logic, reason and common sense were behind them. He wasn't looking at just the immediate. He was looking at all possible results of all options when recommending things. Trump isn't good at that part, the what happens later part. It's why his presidency has been full of unpredictable chaos and horrible decisions.
I go back to these articles. The first one was in March of 2018:
A year into Trump’s tenure, Mattis has become a quietly central figure in an administration of near-constant purges. He may be the lone cabinet member to have survived with his status and dignity intact, and in the process his Pentagon — perhaps the one national institution that is still fully functional — has inherited an unusually powerful role in the shaping of American foreign policy. The removal of Tillerson and the national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, has further reduced the core of the group once known as the “committee to save America,” underscoring Mattis’s unique position and putting even more weight on his relationship with the president. Although their conversations are a tightly guarded secret, Trump is said to consult Mattis regularly about a wide range of subjects. “I think the president calls him for a gut check on all these things,” I was told by an executive who knows Trump well. “He doesn’t do whatever Mattis says, but he does defer to him.” Mattis seems to possess a unique ability to steer Trump without drawing his wrath. He has deftly deflected some of Trump’s rulings (on transgender soldiers in the military, for instance). Sometimes he issues veiled criticisms; at other times, it’s his silence that sends a message, as when he refused to join cabinet members defending Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris agreement in June or when he refused to join the chorus of sycophantic tributes by other cabinet members shortly afterward. (“We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda” was the offering of the former chief of staff, Reince Priebus.)
Mattis’s unusual standing in the administration — “He’s more than a secretary of defense,” one veteran diplomat told me — has put him in a paradoxical position. His boss, infatuated with raw military power, packed his administration with retired and active generals. But Mattis himself is visibly uneasy about being thrust into a political role. Relying on the reputation of generals to win over Congress or the public “sets up military leaders as the guarantors of public support, something that should be anathema to the longstanding balance of civil-military roles in America,” Mattis and a colleague wrote in an essay published in 2016.
One of his most frequent talking points, in speeches and off-the-cuff press appearances, is the need to match military strength with more soft power and diplomacy. Mattis seems acutely aware that he has inherited an office whose powers have been steadily expanding for years. The growth of the national security colossus since 9/11 has transformed America’s relations with the rest of the world, overshadowing the State Department and other civilian agencies. As the Pentagon embraced counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, the State Department withdrew behind bunkers and blast walls, ceding much of its role to men and women in uniform. In 2008, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, began warning about the “creeping militarization of some aspects of America’s foreign policy,” with the State Department withering and the Pentagon steadily expanding.
Mattis seems to have recognized that promoting diplomacy would be an uphill battle in the Trump administration. To that end, he quickly formed an unusual bond with Tillerson, whom he called “St. Rex,” calling to mind a heroic martyr stippled with Trumpian arrows. The two men talked daily and made synchronized appearances, forming a united front on almost every major issue. Mattis saw in Tillerson a temperamental and ideological ally, a deliberative man whose experience at Exxon trained him to value international relationships but not the glad-handing that often accompanies diplomacy. Both men can be a little scornful of the press, and Mattis — whose hero status renders him almost invulnerable — has received little criticism for the media restrictions he has imposed across the Pentagon. (Although I spent time with him last April, he declined repeated requests for a one-on-one interview afterward.) At times, though, Mattis seemed more committed to diplomacy than Tillerson. In November, when the White House proposed cutting the State Department’s budget by about 31 percent, Mattis urged Tillerson to push back, but Tillerson refused. “Mattis can be very effective in supporting a position, but not in creating one,” I was told by Ryan C. Crocker, who served as the United States ambassador to six Muslim countries and has known Mattis for almost 20 years.
It is a measure of Washington’s profoundly anxious condition that Mattis, dismissed as a warmonger during the Obama administration, has been held up in liberal circles as a potential savior. He has mostly tried to keep American policy on autopilot, and that is deeply reassuring to many people who fear Trump’s instincts. In Syria, for instance, Mattis maintained the Obama administration’s military alliance with Kurdish guerrillas in the fight against ISIS and has now expanded it, though without really adjusting for political realities of an emerging Kurdish state. In January, when Tillerson formalized the decision to stay on and expand the mission, he sketched out grandiose goals — pushing back against Iran and Assad and preserving friendships with the Turks — without saying how those conflicting aims could be accomplished. The policy’s contradictions became apparent almost immediately. Days after Tillerson’s announcement, the Turkish military launched a bombing campaign against America’s Kurdish allies, and there is no sign yet of how the administration hopes to reconcile its partners. Something very similar could be said about Trump’s Afghanistan policy, introduced last August: more soldiers, more promises, but no plan to manage the regional power struggles that have kept America tied down for 17 years.
This one is from when he was first selected for the Secretary of Defense:
“Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?” Mattis said at the Heritage Foundation in 2015, speaking about the separate challenges of the Islamic State and Iranian-backed terrorism. “I suggest the answer is no, but we need to have the discussion. If we won’t even ask the question, how do we even recognize which is our side in a fight?”
To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass legislation to bypass a federal law stating that defense secretaries must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exemption just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.
Mattis, 66, served more than four decades in the Marine Corps and is known as one of the most influential military leaders of his generation, a strategic thinker who occasionally drew rebukes for his aggressive talk. Since retiring, he has served as a consultant and as a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University.
Like Trump, Mattis favors a tougher stance against U.S. adversaries abroad, especially Iran. The general, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in April, said that while security discussions often focus on terrorist groups such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, the Iranian regime is “the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”
But Mattis may break with Trump’s practice of calling out allies for not doing enough to build stability. Mattis served from November 2007 to August 2010 as the supreme allied commander of transformation for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, focused on improving the military effectiveness of allies. Trump called NATO “obsolete” earlier this year before saying later that he was “all for NATO” but wanted all members to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, a NATO goal.
That, right there was the final straw. He strongly believes in maintaining a strong relationship with allies. Trump is confusing allies and enemies. When Trump decided to stop helping Syria and Afghanistan, he decided to abandon allies. With that action he started helping Russia, an enemy. That was the breaking point, and reason decided to walk away.
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